Dames Are Trouble
by Verdot
Summary: Veld never liked women that dressed like that, came into his office with an obvious kind of sexuality as if he didn’t notice and as if he cared. Veld/Lucrecia with mix and match of Hojo, Vincent, and Ifalna


AN: Kind of a dare from someone, canonicity and you know, timeline may be off, but it was wicked fun.

* * *

"Are you gay?"

He looked up from the form in front of him and gave the owner of the high heeled shoes he'd noticed earlier a strange look. Who was this again?

"Excuse me?"

She put a hand on her hip, in an impatient gesture. "I've been standing here for ten minutes and you haven't even looked up."

"That just means I'm busy, not homosexual, miss."

Veld squinted a little. Well, considering what she was wearing, he could see where she might say something ridiculous like that. Another secretary already? They seemed to go through them faster than bullets around here, which said a lot. He supposed he would have to show her to the secretarial pool, she was obviously disoriented.

She tapped a foot.

"In a minute, miss."

"Someone was supposed to meet me here, but they didn't. They sent me up here to see you. You're Veld, correct?"

If this was a recruit, he was going to have _words_ with someone. It'd been a disorganized mess since Tally had been lost. Especially lately, as even Valentine was indisposed--something involving that father of his. Veld didn't understand why the kid would want to look for that creep, but his parents weren't around anymore. Well, the one that counted, anyway.

"Yes. Which department are you here for?" He really hoped it was Urban Planning or something like that.

"Science. I'm Dr. Lucrecia Crescent." The way she said her name implied that for some reason, he was supposed to know it. He glanced down at his ink blotter--he always kept a small list there of names he was supposed to know. Well, there she was, scribbled in on the bottom. He must have forgotten again. He'd have to be more mindful.

"Oh, right. Well, I show you to the labs, then." Sometimes Shinra treated them more like butlers than anything else. It grated on Veld a little, but he tried not to let it show.

He got a better look of her. He didn't particularly like the way she dressed. He was always of the mind that people that wanted to be treated professionally made sure to look professional too. Then again, he'd had similar problems with Valentine. Maybe those two would get along. Veld wanted to shudder at the thought.

"Do you come down here often?"

He let out a short laugh. "Only as often as I need to."

"Are you afraid of scientists?"

He wanted the elevator doors close and got the feeling that enclosed spaces were the last types of places he needed to be in. Still. She sounded fairly intelligent, this Lucrecia, and he was terminally bored of forms and meetings and the occasional offhanded text message from his wandering partner.

"We're of types that just don't... mingle well."

She leaned against the somewhat reflective wall of the elevator, with her long legs crossed at the ankle comfortably. Lucrecia smirked in a slow and meaningful manner. It was the type of expression that could say many things if someone were looking for them.

"We use too many big words?"

"No, you have a certain air of superiority that we _humble_ Turks do not deal well with."

"So you fancy yourself a bit of an intellectual. I see."

Veld had decided that he didn't really like Dr. Lucrecia Crescent that much. It was in the way she smiled. He'd seen pictures of a Wutain scientist that they wanted to bring in to help replace the elder Valentine, despite Gast's protests. Of course, that man was weak. Someone like this woman wasn't weak in the slightest.

The elevator finally reached their destination, though.

"Third door on the left."

"Not going to give me a tour?"

"Gast knows it better than I do. And I'm late for a meeting."

He didn't like the feeling of eyes on his back when he turned back to re-enter the elevator.

_ooo_

Veld had taken to counting days and he didn't even notice it. The office was just too silent. Too many people were elsewhere. He hadn't let himself really _miss_ Tally, because there had always been a distraction. But all his distractions were being good kids or making peace with something that he didn't understand. He had read that some religions celebrated their dead; his vision of Her was as familiar as a piece of furniture. People didn't celebrate armchairs.

"I'm going to start counting things if the day drags on like this," he muttered to himself, remembering something from a psychology course he'd taken. Veld was starting to collect degrees in his free time, all through correspondence and the occasional night course. He'd only had to get a note from work once when he missed a class--some Prime Minister of something or other. Jobs tended to blur together after a while.

So when his phone rang, he almost wanted to profess his undying love to the caller. Anything was better than this sort of silence.

"Veld? Oh thank god you're around. We need some help."

_Gast._ He felt a rock in his stomach. He'd never cared for the man--it was one thing playing with people lives, but it was another thing altogether having no spine while doing it. At least Grimoire could command a room. It was clearly an inheritable trait.

"What sort of help." He tried not to bite the question off at the end, and failed.

"The kind that requires your sidearm?"

Well, at least Shinra had the sense not to give Gast a gun.

"Just keep it contained as best you can."

Veld had been reading through files again. It had nothing to do with the fact that someone should have been in the office instead of... wherever, but more to do with the fact that staff changeovers were happening. He was supposed to pick up someone that they'd been contracting work out to from Wutai--a trip he was looking forward to, if only for the change of scenery--and he didn't want to be called in when Ms. Crescent's work didn't coincide with the new guy's.

'Materia induced studies in the reanimation of dead cells' was one of the things he'd actually remembered from her rather thick file. He wasn't an idiot. Something like that could mean anything from advanced healing to medical abomination. Oh, and she was _twenty_. She must have been a fetus when she started college. God, they were getting younger every year.

Taking the elevator to the basement where they currently kept the Science Department was such an automatic action. He didn't even remember pushing the button.

She was waiting outside the door in yet another short skirt. Woman must have been proud of her legs or believed she was invincible. Veld knew the reason they didn't have skirt suits for the female Turks, other than to give them an equal footing. It was madness that a department that handled god knows what kind of chemicals and needles didn't institute a similar kind of uniform.

"Hello Veld."

"Is it alive or what?" He didn't bother with the pleasantries. If Gast was calling him up with that nervous voice of his then it was probably a test animal.

"Just a wolf." Yes, there was something unsettling about this woman. She clearly wasn't afraid of the things she should have at least been worried about.

He looked at his handgun. "I'm going to need something bigger."

Of course, that's when it leapt through the door—_he was going to kill Gast for not closing the damned door_—and snarled at the two humans standing quite off guard in the hallway. If Veld had bothered to look over in Lucrecia's direction he would have seen that she didn't start at the large, black, mangy wolf that was left of what had to be quite a proud animal once.

"Don't move, Doctor." God, it felt weird calling someone a good six years younger than him _doctor_.

But of course, she moved. Which meant he had to move to make sure she didn't get eaten. _Fucking great._

"Dammit!" he hissed, pushing her in the opposite direction of where she was going, which was away from the door, and into the lab. When the door was closed and he checked to see that nothing on his person had gotten bitten he turned to glare at her.

"What the hell was that?!"

She tossed her bangs out of her face. "I was going to get it to come to me."

"Are you fucking insane, woman?" And he was cursing at someone that was not a Turk. Stupid, stupid woman. Who was incidentally wearing obnoxiously hot pink underwear. Well, he'd heard that a woman in the Weapons department never wore any at all, so he could count himself less scarred by the experience.

"As I was trying to tell Gast before he called you and as I was going to tell you before you pulled that caveman stunt of yours, it's _tamed_."

"Tamed."

"Well, it doesn't like men, though."

"Charming." What did she do, starve it to death, though? He'd seen wolves roaming outside of Junon before. They were much more muscular than that one was.

She held out a hand, expecting him to help her up. Veld briefly thought about just walking out, but at least helping her up gave him a chance to jerk her arm a bit. It was a little childish.

"Do you always dash to the rescue like that?"

"I do my job, if that's what you're asking."

"But you're not supposed to protect me."

"I won't make the same mistake twice. Go collect your wolf so that I can get back to what I was doing."

She smoothed down the back of her ponytail, so that it stopped sticking up. "Which was what, waiting on the phone?"

Clearly all scientists were made to annoy him. "I was waiting on orders."

Lucrecia smirked. "So what do I owe you for the daring rescue? Food, drink, company?"

"Nothing. Just get your wolf."

"Suit yourself."

It took him a few moments, once her heels had echoed a bit in the hallway to realize that she had just asked him out. She had some nerve.

_ooo_

For years, they only brushed past each other. They were dedicated to their jobs, despite Veld's initial misgivings about the woman's intelligence. Lucrecia did her thing, he did his. He brushed off her influence, which seemed to seep in like a fog. He brushed off those times that she looked right at him, and he brushed off the feeling that maybe she'd looked at a wild-tamed animal in the same way.

_ooo_

"Are you always here?"

She was no longer nineteen and he was no longer twenty-five. A long and tall shadow had just passed through, angry at him again. But there was fighting, and then there was _fighting_ and this was unfortunately the latter. He'd just wanted to see Ifalna, because she had this tendency to make his bad moods melt away. But Lucrecia had come outside instead.

He closed his eyes and leaned further against the tree trunk. "No."

"You know, for such a busy man you're out here an awful lot."

"I'm supposed to check in every once in a while. It's my job."

"Ah, but I think we both know you're lying. But only one of us finds anything wrong with it."

He sighed. "What do you want, Lucrecia?"

She barely made a sound as she sat down on the ground, legs folded modestly. "I'm trying to figure out what it is about you."

He side glanced her. "_What it is?_ How vague for a scientist."

"Did you know that your Turk is developing a bit of a morality?"

Well she certainly changed the subject. He didn't like the way she said _your_, though. "Morality?"

Ifalna had said that springtime in regions like this were all the more dramatic, because the winters were so bleak. People didn't know how to appreciate the fact that things would grow again if there were always flowers. But the mountain people that had to board up their windows when the ice got too thick always appreciated it more.

He'd always thought that he would appreciate a temperate climate, though.

"You really do think you're a predator. That you're _bad_. Loathsome. Because rookies shy from you and those you'd share your time and, well... are barely human."

Veld knew the interest wasn't personal. Lucrecia was a scientist, obviously one with a psychology bend to her biological studies. He'd seen her kind, at the end of the war trying to bottle up rage and disappointment because they thought no one else had. At least she had a talent for making him feel _old_.

"My word, Miss Crescent, your stunning analysis just shook the very foundations I'd built my life upon. What_ever_ will I do now."

And then she laughed, not the shrill one he'd sometimes heard, but an honestly genuine laugh. He figured she'd play the duplicitous matron and fatale act some more... just went to show that he still did not understand women at all.

"Can we talk now, like people that aren't having problems with too many lovers and too little care to spare?"

He shrugged. "What is it you want to talk about?"

She smoothed the asymmetrical and decent length skirt, and her ridiculous ponytail crept onto her shoulder as she shifted her weight.

"Absolutely nothing of importance."

He smirked. "Nice weather we're having, don't you think?"

_ooo_

There was a time... that even he lost his poker face.

Hojo was always a boastful type of man, and Veld could appreciate that kind of obviousness. There was a part of his mind too that held those kind of petty jealousies and rivalries, but he liked to think that at least he could cover them up in _something_. But Hojo, he never bothered with that kind of subtlety.

Neither did she.

Marriage, dating, all these things were not discouraged amongst Shinra employees. In some ways, it was almost encouraged--better to keep it in all in the family. The Veld that went to church found the practice distasteful, but at this rate, he'd racked up enough negative credits that his distaste didn't count in the slightest.

He almost didn't come, but Ifalna had asked, and she wasn't the type he could turn down over the phone. Or anywhere really. Veld could almost believe in witchcraft around her, the underlying _old_ kind that was concerned with stealing souls instead of levitating things.

Lucrecia's hand was on Vincent's tie and despite the fact that none of the scientists wore rings for practicality's sake, it was _that hand_. He knew that gesture, that possessive and haughty gesture, as if she were trying to assert her position as the center of this little fake universe.

It didn't take Veld long to feel a nearly sociopathic type of aggression towards, well, anyone, it was a fact of his nature that he'd learned to deal with. But real, honest _hatred_ was something he thought himself far above, but she was really pushing his attempt at _some_ kind of moral superiority.

"Oh, I didn't see you, Veld."

He didn't know which was worse, her tone, or the almost guilty look on Vincent's face. God, the kid never regretted anything, who _was_ this woman to bring out that kind of humanity?

"I was just leaving."

_ooo_

Not two hours later, once he'd put the incident out of his mind, he found himself alone in the lab with her. Which was just _splendid_ as he couldn't seem to find Ifalna anywhere and there was really no point to him leaving his work all the time to visit this nowhere place for a weekend.

God _forbid_ he was trying to get back a little sanity.

"I have no wish to be part of whatever it is that you're doing, so if you're here for your lab equipment, I'll just leave."

"You make it sound like I stole your toys."

Fine, if she was going to be a catty bitch pain in the ass he was going to _move_ her out of his way. But she anticipated his rough attempt to shove her out of the way as he made for the door, and dug her nails into his arm.

"Let go."

"You don't _really_ think I'm interested in him, do you? Those naive clingy types are so tiresome."

Nose to nose now, his dominant hand fisted in the material of her blouse, he _knew_ that letting her have the reaction she wanted was a bad idea, but he was offended for that fool of a best friend of his. Veld could almost taste the things that she wanted to say about Ifalna and any other person he associated with to bring him down to a level that she was probably cataloging in her head.

"I don't give a damn what you think."

Wrong answer.

She smiled. "But I think you do. You're an intelligent and deeply insecure man... why else is it that you seem attracted to people that in their own ways _crave_ your attention?"

He'd play it differently, he would turn it around, because dammit, no psychobabble was going to write him off that easily or be that wrong. "You don't know everything, Lucrecia."

"Oh I don't?" He bit back the urge to slap her--because he wouldn't do that to a woman, he was better than that--as she curled her fingers in his hair, as if it was something she did all the time.

No, a long time ago he'd figured out what it was about the kind of people that could really _undo_ him. And as lovely and as powerful and as intelligent as Mrs. Hojo was, she certainly had a pale effect to those that really mattered.

"It's about trust, I don't think you'll ever understand that."

Of course he kissed her, it removed her ability to reply with more intelligent nothings and took away what he assumed she thought was her trump card. Veld was almost satisfied that he still had it, that false sincerity he could use on missions, the kind that sometimes made him worry he could never _honestly_ be sincere, having lived the lie too long.

He was just about to send Lucrecia on her way when he heard it, a sob that had been choked back, but not enough to stay silent. The reaction was immediate, to drop his hold on Lucrecia and go in the direction of the sound. He caught a hint of magenta before running after it.

If he'd turned back, he'd probably have noticed Lucrecia had won after all.


End file.
